Children’s developing representations of mental life: Conceptual changes between 4-9 years of age

Chapter III: An adult endpoint (reanalysis of Weisman et al., 2017)

Chapter overview

The primary goal of this dissertation is to describe how conceptual representations of mental life develop over early and middle childhood - but before diving into the development of this concept, it is useful to examine an adult endpoint. This is provided by my previous work on concepts of mental life among ordinary US adults (Weisman et al., 2017). This previous work provides the theoretical foundation for this dissertation, as well as a design template for the developmental studies to be discussed in the following chapters.

The studies described in Weisman et al. (2017) were designed to address our first question about conceptual representation: What are the fundamental components, or “conceptual units,” of ordinary people’s representation of mental life? Analyses of this question were the primary focus of Weisman et al. (2017). However, as I argued in Chapter XX, the design of these studies also provides an opportunity to examine two other key aspects of these representations: the organization of these units and the way this concept is applied or deployed in reasoning about the wide variety of “beings” in the world.

In this chapter, I provide a summary of my previous findings regarding the conceptual units employed by US adults in their representations of mental life, as published in Weisman et al. (2017). I then present a novel re-analysis of these datasets, designed to shed light on the organization of these conceptual units - a topic that was not addressed in Weisman et al. (2017). Finally, I summarize what these studies suggest about the application or deployment of these conceptual representations in reasoning about specific target beings (e.g., humans, other mammals, insects, technologies, etc.) - a topic that was only briefly discussed in Weisman et al. (2017). Taken together, these three perspectives on the data first published in Weisman et al. (2017) paint a comprehensive picture of US adults’ conceptual representations of mental life, which in turn provides an adult endpoint for the developmental work that constitutes the bulk of this dissertation.

Conceptual units

Organization of conceptual units

Application